The elevator doors opened on a second pair of doors in the service basement of the Lexington Regal Hotel in Murray Hill. Odessa pushed through into a narrow hallway made narrower by housekeeping carts lined along the right-side wall. She walked in front of Hugo Blackwood, heading toward the sound of industrial churning and a man’s voice rapping in falsetto Spanish.

A left turn took her into the artificially warm laundry room. Four huge laundry machines sloshed and spun side by side across from four front-loading dryers, combining to perform a symphony of cyclonic droning. A woman of South American heritage wearing a brown Lexington Regal vest oversaw a chop-socky folding machine serving thin white hotel towels, which she stacked in an open-sided canvas cart. A man with his back to them rocked rhythmically to the music playing through his thick headphones before the audience of industrial washing machines.

He must have sensed their approach, because he turned, lowering his headphones to hang around his neck. “Help you?” he said.

“Mauro Esquivel?” said Odessa.

“Yes, that’s me,” he said.

She showed him her FBI credentials. “We’d like to ask you a couple of questions.”

The woman in the hotel vest said, “Okay, bye,” and switched off the towel-folding machine, walking right out of the room.

Mauro looked at Odessa and Blackwood apprehensively. “What kind of questions?”

Odessa said, “You’re not in any trouble. We want to ask you about something that went down in the past.”

The lights flickered. Mauro walked to a light switch timer and reset it for three minutes. Then he turned his head such that he eyed them almost from a profile. “How’d you find me here?”

“Your parole officer. She’s very pleased with your progress.”

“She better be,” he said. “Bustin’ my ass here.”

He looked at Blackwood strangely, as if getting a weird vibe from the gaunt man in the expensive suit. Odessa identified with that sentiment.

“I can save you some time,” said Mauro. “You trying to play me into giving up some people, rolling over for you, I can’t do it. Just take me in now, pull my parole. It’s not worth my life, my kid’s life, my family back in Argentina. Forget it.”

Odessa shook her head. “We’re not here about the narcotics rap. Not really.”

“If this is about papers, I am a citizen, I was born here.”

“Again,” said Odessa, “we’re really not here to hassle you.”

Mauro chuckled. “Right. What is it then? And who’s Slender Man?”

Odessa answered, “I don’t actually know.”

Hugo Blackwood said, “We want to know about the grave you robbed.”

Mauro went white. He stammered. “Look, that was a mistake, I got snared up in something bad, and that was a while ago.”

“So it wasn’t your idea to dig up the dead girl’s coffin?” said Blackwood.